It can be easy to misunderstand this point. Plato thought that the typical citizen in a democracy is an unreliable pursuer of truth:
Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything.23
Plato notoriously thought this meant that governance should be handed over to philosopher-kings. They would be able to acquire political knowledge, and then disseminate it, as needed, to the other citizens. The net effect, he thought, would be a better-informed citizenry. Current autocratic governments make similar arguments in defense of restrictions on speech and online searches. By weeding out so-called false influences, they say, these restrictions make it easier for citizens to access the truth.
This argument misses its mark on two fronts. First, the virtues of the philosopher-king have a way of becoming the vices of the tyrant. Intellectual arrogance comes for us all, and any mechanism that makes knowledge the province of a few will inevitably grind to a halt because of that fact. Second, Dewey’s point isn’t about the individual alone. One can agree with Plato that we are all generally terrible inquirers. We lurch off the road to truth at the least distraction. But that fact only makes Dewey’s point. The space of reasons, a space of discourse that allows for the pursuit of truth, aims to be built in a way that corrects for the crooked timber of its materials—that is, to be constructed out of practices that aim to correct for the biases of their individual participants. To put it plainly, just as Socrates advises that we individual citizens pursue truth with an attitude of intellectual humility, so should democracies bolster those institutions—science, education, the media—that encourage the pursuit of truth in similar ways.
But what ways are those? The question is complex, but I think it’s clear that we should urge those institutions that engage in inquiry to promote the use of what I’ll call “reflective practices.” Reflective practices get us to focus on how we think and, in particular, how we believe.
Reflective practices are not as exotic as they sound. In his book The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande details the struggles in getting doctors to use checklists before surgery.24 The checklists were intended to prevent errors, including, for example, removing the wrong limb. Somewhat surprisingly, surgeons had resisted this practice for years. Following a checklist, many doctors had argued, was unnecessary; they were highly trained experts and they didn’t want to be lulled into a false sense of security that a completed checklist might provide. None of these arguments turned out to be very persuasive. Data subsequently collected in a series of studies showed that checklists saved lives. Not surprisingly either, other professionals—airline pilots, for example—had used checklists for decades.
The case illustrates how intellectual arrogance can tempt the best of us, and how we can combat it. Using a checklist helps us combat arrogance because a checklist is a reflective practice. A checklist is designed not to help you know new information; it helps you check on whether you know what you think you do. Are you amputating the right leg or the left? Is there sufficient fuel for the trip? These are important questions for surgeons and pilots, and if they are well trained and competent, of course, they don’t need a checklist to know the answers. But that’s not the point. The point of the checklist is not to answer those questions but to help people check on their answers. And in so doing, it does one other really important thing: a checklist reminds us of our own fallibility—and therefore combats arrogance by training us to remember that we don’t always know what we think we do.
There is another aspect of these two examples that makes them relevant for our purposes. Pilots and surgeons are similar in at least three important respects: their jobs take immense concentration, they require quick decision-making in often stressful situations, and the cost of a mistake can be extraordinarily high. It is not surprising, therefore, that both professions attract very similar sorts of personalities: people who are bright, cool under fire, and not prone to second-guessing themselves. These are qualities you want in people who have those sorts of jobs. You want them to be highly trained and to have a high degree of self-trust—to not be hesitant.
Yet it is not difficult to imagine that these same qualities can also encourage intellectual arrogance. If you are told you are good at making quick, tough decisions and then acting on them, you may come to confuse the basis of your self-trust. You might start thinking you are right just because you are, well, you. (That doesn’t mean that pilots or surgeons are always arrogant, of course.) The checklist can work against that tendency, just as the more humdrum checklists that the rest of us use do. Checklists serve as a constant reminder of our fallibility.
Another salient part of Gawande’s story of the checklist is that checklists, once institutionalized, become part of the social background of that institution. The social background of an institution is the set of norms and practices that its participants take for granted, that they assume as part of its normal functioning. When professionally institutionalized, following a checklist is a reflective practice that becomes part of the social background for people working in those professions. That’s the reason it can encourage humility—or one aspect of intellectual humility. It works away in the background even when the individuals involved are intellectually arrogant and thus are less-than-ideal pursuers of truth.
Other reflective practices also do this—practices that are scalable and can be enshrined in institutions. For example, training to raise awareness of sexual harassment and implicit bias is a reflective practice. If done well, training like this gets us to focus on not only our actions but also our habits of mind, our assumptions—our mind-set. It reminds us of our fallibility, but it also encourages us to take seriously the experiences of other people. Another example is fact-checking practices in journalism. The news media not only gets us information. It also serves as a key reflective function society-wide: it is the “watchdog” that checks on both itself and the pronouncements of those in power, and it does that in part through fact-checking. As such, the news media, too, can combat arrogance by reminding us of the fallibility of the powerful. And as I’ve already argued, peaceful protest and critical dissent can also act in the same way. All of these practices can make us more aware of how we approach the world, and of the assumptions that we bring with us.
Ultimately, the question of which reflective practices we should make part of the social background is an empirical one. The philosophical point is that reflective practices can and are used to encourage intellectual humility at the level of institutions. And that is a hopeful idea.
To resolve disputes and achieve consensus, democracies need a common currency of reasons and evidence to trade in. The edifices of inquiry just discussed—a free press, scientific, artistic, and educational institutions, and so on—collectively form the mint for this currency. They aim to provide us with evidence and the means to appreciate it that enable us to trade in reasons. And these institutions are made better, are improved in their basic function, when they put reflective practices into their social background.
Without such institutions and practices, democracy suffers, and that is why we should be so concerned about the attacks mounted on them by tyrants the world over. By harming the institutions that are our best shield against tribal arrogance, those attacks contribute to its spread. We form our opinions within a community; when things are going right, we trust each other as sources of expertise, and we trust in the institutions—the media, science—meant to assist in that process. But once we start becoming tribally arrogant know-it-alls, trust breaks down because the tribally arrogant dismiss evidence as fake news and label any institution that supports it an enemy of the people.
And sadly, the reverse also holds. To the extent that experts are themselves arrogant or perceived to be so, they can lose the trust of the very people who need them. That’s why it can be a mistake for scientists to ignore climate-change skeptics, to refuse to
debate them or not bother to direct critical fire at their arguments. I say this while fully realizing that giving credence to a criticism, legitimate or otherwise, can increase its visibility and possibly lead to more people taking it seriously. But try to suppress a criticism, and public discourse finds a way of bringing it back up. This is how the ideologies of arrogance corrupt reasonable discourse: they make it so that both responding to criticism and not responding to it end up undermining democratic attitudes and ideals.
The overall argument I’ve pulled from Socrates and Dewey is this: the Socratic lesson is that our best hope for believing with integrity is to pursue truth with the attitude of intellectual humility. That attitude consists in both owning one’s limitations and being willing to learn from the experience of others. But it is also what is required by the ideal of democracy as a space of reasons. That ideal takes the pursuit of truth as an essential democratic good, embodied in those social practices and institutions that promote intellectually humble inquiry. That’s why these same institutions—the press, science education, peaceful dissent—are the best defense against tribal arrogance. It is also why they are the most threatened by it.
To some, this will sound like a precarious argument. Truth, one might think, is too airy a notion, too intangible, on which to even partly found democracy. It is to this skepticism—skepticism about truth itself—that I now turn.
Truth and Democracy
“Truth isn’t truth,” a spokesperson for the president remarked not long ago, capturing in one bizarre moment the essence of not only the administration’s hostile relationship with reality, but the “post-truth” attitude eating away at the foundations of our democracy. Strictly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as being “post-truth.” Truth is truth, no matter what politicians might say. But the post-truth attitude, on the other hand, is real.
One reason for this attitude is the simple fact that we live in a digital world that makes it both easier and harder to figure out what is true. That very fact, if we aren’t careful, can lead us into thinking that objectivity is a dead value. We get so used to contradictory information, rival sources, that we can talk ourselves into thinking truth is irrelevant.
We’ve already encountered relativism about truth—an old idea that goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek rhetorician Protagoras, who held that objective truth was an illusion because “man is the measure of all things.” But the kind of cynicism about truth now at work in our political culture is importantly different from Protagoras’s theory. The relativist can still think truth is important; it is just relative. This stance is different from dismissing the importance of truth altogether.
To some, skepticism about truth sounds like a sophisticated bit of political realism. Talk of truth is for the loser; alternative facts are for winners. To others, who confuse truth with entrenched belief, such skepticism may seem liberating, freeing us from what others take for granted. Neither attitude is particularly compelling. Truth does not pick winners and losers, and just because most people believe something does not guarantee that it is true any more than it guarantees that it is wise or just. And the inference from “we cannot agree, therefore truth is irrelevant” is just fallacious. In its simplest form, it confuses the difficulty of being certain with the impossibility of truth. It is always difficult to know for certain what is true. Maybe you really live in the Matrix. Maybe you have a brain chip implant feeding you all the wrong information. But in practice, we do all agree on some facts: that bullets kill people, that you can’t flap your arms and fly.
Maybe, however, our agreement on some facts shows that it is agreement, after all, that we are after. One of the twentieth century’s most distinguished and brilliant philosophers, Richard Rorty, would sometimes put things that way:
The grounding premise of my argument is that you cannot aim at something, cannot work to get it, unless you can recognize it once you have got it. . . . We shall never know for sure whether a given belief is true, but we can be sure that nobody is presently able to summon up any residual objections to it, that everybody agrees that it ought to be held.25
In sum, truth cannot be a target of inquiry, because we can never know whether we’ve hit it. And a target we can’t know we’ve hit is no target at all. Yet we can know whether “everybody agrees” with a belief. Therefore, agreement or consensus, not truth, is the proper aim of inquiry. It is what we really aim at in politics and in life.
I am more than happy to agree that agreement is important. This book, after all, has been driven by the worry that our penchant for intellectual arrogance is only deepening political disagreement. But that doesn’t mean agreement is the only thing that matters. What we agree about on Monday we may not agree about on Tuesday. And the fact that we do agree on some proposition is no guarantee that it is true. Agreement is just a sign that we may be closer to the truth—an indication, not a sure bet.
There is an old philosophical problem about happiness—arguably going back to the Greeks: that you can’t pursue happiness directly because when you do, you invariably make yourself less happy. If you explicitly do things—make friends, engage in a career, and so on—only as a means to your own happiness, you are bound to find that happiness slipping away. Ask yourself whether you are happy, John Stuart Mill once remarked in his autobiography, putting a fine point on the matter, and you’ll discover you are not. The solution, it is often thought, is to pursue it indirectly, to treat happiness as a by-product of activities—friendship, for example—that are good in themselves. Happiness emerges, but only indirectly from the pursuit of other things.
Truth, in certain ways, is like happiness. You can’t pursue it directly. Ask yourself whether your beliefs are really true and you may find, as Descartes and Montaigne both did, that it is extremely hard to believe anything at all. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on truth any more than we should give up on happiness. It just means we must pursue it indirectly.
To take another example, think of the relationship between economic growth and investment. Countries want their wealth to grow. But to make that happen, they must invest in sound policies. The immediate goal is to find out which policies are wise or sound. That doesn’t mean that the ultimate goal is not economic growth; it just means you can’t get to one without the other—even though, sadly, one can follow wise policies and still end up underwater.
Likewise, truth is the ultimate end of inquiry, but we don’t pursue it directly. We pursue it instead indirectly, by pursuing evidence that supplies us with reasons for belief. Indirectly or not, however, it is truth that supplies the point of the pursuit, and truth that distinguishes it from merely pursuing whatever rallies others to our cause or flatters our opinions. Truth is also what distinguishes the pursuit of evidence from the practice of answering objections—that is, from the practice of simply saying whatever silences your opponent, or gets them to nod in agreement. Reasons are important in and of themselves. But reasons for a belief are reasons precisely because they are not mere means to their own end; they are means to the further end of truth. Thus, like agreement, reason giving is distinct from truth precisely as a means is distinct from its end.
Still, truth can seem a mysterious and paradoxical concept—or just too “airy” to have any real use. Pontius Pilate’s rhetorical query “What is truth?” echoes the implicit views of many people that it is not really a question we can answer. If not, then perhaps the skeptic is on to something after all. This second kind of skepticism about truth is often encouraged by a kind of all-or-nothing approach to understanding what truth is: it either has one explicable nature or none at all.
Many philosophers throughout history have assumed, with Gottfried Leibniz, that we should be “content with looking for truth in the correspondence between the propositions which are in the mind and the things which they are about.”26 Truth is a relationship between mind and world, and that relationship is a kind of correspondence or matching. If we think of the world as consi
sting of facts, such as the fact that there is a cat on my mat, or that grass is green, and so on, then in order to be true, our thoughts must correspond to some independent objective fact. Thus, it is true that there is a cat on the mat when there is, in fact, a real cat on a real mat.
The “correspondence theory” of truth, as it has come to be called, is a very reasonable view when dealing with propositions about cats, mats, grass, and the other middle-sized physical objects in our environment. The problem is that, as philosophers from Nietzsche onward are fond of pointing out, it is less easy to see which physical facts mathematical, economic, or moral beliefs correspond to. Yet it is still true that there is no such thing as a free lunch, or that 2 and 2 make 4, or that sexual harassment is morally wrong. Hence, some philosophers have thought that the correspondence theory of truth, being inapplicable to such beliefs, must be wrong. But if you think that the correspondence theory is the only way to understand truth, then you may be apt to think that the whole concept is confused.
That, in my view, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. One doesn’t have to think that there is one and only one way for our various kinds of beliefs to be true. No rule says that truth and knowledge in morality must be as they are in physics.27 But putting the metaphysics aside, the concept of truth—the basic idea—is not all that difficult to understand.
To grasp the concept of objective truth, you really only need to see two points. First, believing doesn’t make it so. We can’t just make up facts because that is what we want the world to be like. Otherwise, life would be a lot easier than it is. Second, to paraphrase Hamlet’s warning to Horatio, there are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your PowerPoint presentation. There will always be facts we don’t know about. Consider, to take a trivial example, the proposition that the number of stars in the universe right now is odd. That is a fact or it isn’t, since the number will be either even or odd. If it is a fact, we’ll never know, because the vast distances in the universe and the laws of physics concerning the speed of light mean that even if we ran around at the speed of light and counted all the stars we could see, many would have turned to dust millions of years earlier by the time we were done counting. And of course there are many facts like this, about the distant past, about far parts of the universe, about numbers that are extraordinarily complex. No one can know it all.
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